What to Fix First in a Dolby Vision Trim Pass With Conflicting Trim Slopes

You've got a Dolby Vision trim pass open. The source is graded for a 1000-nit P3 mastering display. Your trim target is a 400-nit SDR consumer TV. You launch with the standard trim sliders—lift, gain, gamma, slope—and almost immediately everything goes sideways. The lift adjustment you made to open up shadows is fighting your gain adjustment meant to hold highlights. The midtone slope you dialed in to preserve contrast is now pushing skin tones into a weird orange. You're chasing your tail. This is the reality of conflicting trim slopes: trim controls aren't independent; they overlap across the luminance range. So what do you fix initial? This article gives you a battle-tested hierarchy for resolving those conflicts without losing your mind.

Why This Topic Matters Now

The HDR gold rush nobody talks about

Dolby Vision displays have quietly taken over. Walk into any electronics retailer—every mid-tier TV in 2025 ships with it. Streaming services now mandate Dolby Vision for flagship originals. Broadcast specs are catching up fast. The result? Colorists who cut their teeth on Rec. 709 are suddenly handed trim passes for HDR masters they didn't create. And the schedule hasn't budged. You're expected to learn the math while the clock runs. That hurts.

Why trim passes dominate post

Full HDR regrades are rare in practice. Most studios deliver a single HDR master, then ask for trims—small adjustments per shot that preserve the original look across brightness levels. Sounds simple. The catch is that trim controls (TrimSlope, TrimOffset, TrimPower) overlap in ways that punish guesswork. I have seen seasoned colorists spend four hours on one scene, chasing a highlight rolloff that kept snapping back because they fixed the wrong control initial.

What breaks primary is almost always the trim slope. You bump it to reduce a blown-out sky, but now skin tones look plasticky in the midtones. So you adjust trim offset to compensate—and suddenly the entire shadow detail collapses. That's the conflict: each control lives inside Dolby's metadata math, not your grading panel's gut feel.

'Three trim parameters fighting each other is normal. Three trim parameters fighting you is a workflow problem.'

— overheard at a HDR roundtable, 2024

The hidden cost of trial and error

Endless tweaking doesn't just eat billable hours—it erodes trust. Directors notice when a trim pass feels 'off' but can't articulate why. Producers see the clock ticking. And you, the colorist, end up with a timeline full of half-fixed shots that look correct only on the reference monitor, then break on the client's OLED at home. The pitfall is assuming that all trim controls are equally important. They aren't. Prioritizing the wrong parameter opening can cascade into a three-hour rebuild.

This isn't theory. Last month, a colleague handed me a Dolby Vision trim pass for a feature where every exterior scene had been tweaked with aggressive TrimSlope adjustments. The intent was to preserve highlight detail. Instead, the entire grade had lost its contrast punch—midtones were mushy, shadows lifted. We fixed it in forty minutes. The trick was knowing which knob to touch opening.

The Core Conflict: Overlapping Trim Controls

How Lift, Gain, Gamma, and Slope Actually Overlap

Here’s the dirty secret of Dolby Vision trim passes: those four sliders—lift, gamma, gain, slope—don't respect boundaries. They’re not orthogonal. Dolby’s official docs imply clean zones of influence, but in practice each control bleeds into its neighbor’s territory. Lift, for instance, is marketed as the shadow fixer. Turn it down a tick and your blacks deepen. Problem is, you’ve also nudged the entire low-midroll—anything from IRE 5 up to IRE 25—and now faces look bruised. We fixed a grade last month where the colorist pulled lift –0.03 to save crushed shadows, and suddenly the talent’s collar lost detail. That wasn’t a shadow problem; that was a midtone problem, invaded by a slider that promised isolation.

The catch: slope and gain are worse offenders. Slope lives in the highlights, yes—but its curve shape reaches back into the upper mids, especially above IRE 70. Gain pretends to own the top end, yet a 0.02 gain drop can compress the entire range above IRE 50, not just the specular peaks. So when your creative brief says “protect the skin tones” and your trim pass starts with gain, you’re already fighting a war on two fronts. That’s the core conflict—you reach for one slider to fix a specific zone, and three other zones shift in sympathy. Not a bug; it’s the math. But it means every trim pass is a negotiation, not a prescription.

The Luminance Range Each Control Primarily Affects

If you’re still thinking in RGB lift/gamma/gain from the old Baselight days, unlearn that. Dolby’s trim controls operate on luminance primary, then chroma. Lift lives from 0 to roughly 20 IRE—pure shadow floor. Gamma’s sweet spot is the 20-to-60 IRE midband, where skin and diffuse highlights live. Slope takes over from 60 IRE upward, and gain owns the top 10–15 IRE of the signal. That sounds clean on paper. It isn’t. The transition zones—where lift’s influence fades and gamma’s begins—are soft, not crisp. I have watched colorists yank gamma down to fix a muddy shirt in the mids, only to discover that the specular rolloff on a car hood (80 IRE) also flattened. Wrong order. The shirt sat at IRE 42; gamma touched it and everything up to IRE 55. That overlap is baked into the curve math—you can't will it away.

What usually breaks primary is the midrange. Because gamma touches both ends—it’s the control with the widest shoulder—fixing a gamma conflict often requires you to revisit lift and slope afterward. Most teams skip this: they adjust gamma, see the mids improve, declare victory, and don’t re-check the 5–15 IRE region or the 70–85 IRE region. The result is a grade that looks right on the Flanders but falls apart on an OLED consumer panel where those soft transitions snap into visibility. The odd part is—Dolby’s own training materials show these overlap curves, yet the default workflow in Resolve treats trims as independent. That tension is where conflicting trim slopes are born.

Not every film checklist earns its ink.

Not every film checklist earns its ink.

Why 'Fixing One Thing Breaks Another' Is the Default

Because the controls share influence zones, the fix for a crush in the shadows is never just lift. You pull lift down, the shadows deepen—good—but gamma now has less room to work in the low mids. What was a gentle 5% rolloff turns into a knee. Now skin tones in the 25–35 IRE band gain a plasticky contour. So you grab gamma to smooth that, and gamma’s adjustment ripples up into slope territory, washing out the specular catchlights you spent an hour tuning. That hurts. I’ve seen a single pass spiral into four hours of whack-a-mole because the trim pass started with the wrong slider order—gain primary, then lift, then gamma, each one undoing the previous.

One concrete anecdote: a DCI-Dolby cinema master last fall. The colorist wanted a 0.5-stop highlight rolloff using gain. Gain delivered, but the midtone gamma compressed by 8% without the colorist noticing. To compensate, they raised gamma +0.04, which then pulled the lift floor up 1.5 IRE. The blacks went gray. They pulled lift down –0.02, and the gamma compressed again. That cycle repeated three times before someone suggested starting from scratch with slope as the primary, not gain. Slope shaped the highlights without invading the mids as aggressively. Forty minutes later, the pass was clean. The lesson: the default approach (random-order trim passes) invites conflicts. You must sequence your controls from the most isolated to the most invasive—usually slope, then gain, then gamma, then lift, with constant cross-checking.

“Every trim slider is a politician: it promises to fix one district, but it lobbies for influence in three others.”

— Overheard at a HPA Tech Retreat, reflecting the reality of overlapping curve domains in Dolby Vision.

So no, you can’t avoid the overlap. But you can stop pretending it doesn’t exist. launch every trim pass by asking: which slider owns the problem zone least disruptively? If it’s a specular issue, reach for slope before gain. If it’s a skin-tone contrast problem in the mids, try gamma after you’ve locked slope and lift. The goal isn’t to isolate controls—impossible—but to sequence them so each subsequent adjustment has already accounted for the previous slider’s bleed. That’s the only way to fix one thing without breaking another. Next, we’ll crack open the actual math behind these overlaps—because understanding the transfer function is the difference between guessing and knowing which slider to touch opening.

Under the Hood: How Dolby Vision Trim Math Works

The piecewise trim curve and its pivot points

Dolby Vision trim passes don't apply a single global lift—they carve the luminance range into zones, each with its own pivot. You get three fixed anchors: black (0 nit), the mid-tone reference (around 10–15 nits for SDR mapping), and diffuse white (203 nits for a 1,000-nit target). Between those, the trim math fits a hermite spline—smooth, but not innocent. The slope control rotates the curve around the mid-tone pivot; gamma bends it between black and white without shifting the pivot itself. That sounds fine until you open stacking trims. If you pull slope down to compress highlights while also raising gamma to brighten the mid-tone, you're asking the curve to simultaneously twist and stretch in opposite directions. What actually happens: the DRA algorithm picks a compromise that satisfies neither instruction cleanly, and you get an unnatural roll-off—usually a shoulder that clamps too early or a toe that lifts shadows into noise.

Where slope and gamma intersect hardest

The intersection is brutal in the upper-mid range, roughly 30–60 nits on the source curve. Slope reduces contrast above the pivot—flattening highlights. Gamma increases the curve's curvature below the pivot—lifting quarter-tones. The problem? The pivot sits right where most skin tones and grass detail live. I have seen a grade where a colorist pushed gamma +0.10 and slope −0.15 to fix a dark log source; the result was a "doughnut" luminance dip around 40 nits, because the engine couldn't reconcile the two vectors. The DRA calculator tries to preserve the mapping to the target display's EOTF, but it prioritizes the mid-tone anchor as the locked point. Everything else bends to keep that pivot in place. Wrong order. The seam blows out. The fix is rarely to add a third trim—it's to decide which control actually matches your intent. Do you want more highlight roll-off (slope) or more mid-tone separation (gamma)? Pick one and let the other float within ±0.05 tolerance.

‘Gamma lifts the middle. Slope flattens the top. When both fight, the pivot holds—and your image loses its nerve.’

— observed after chasing a client note that demanded ‘richer skin’ and ‘softer skies’ on the same shot

The role of the DRA (Dynamic Range Adjustment) algorithm

Most teams skip this: the DRA isn't a simple lookup table. It's a tonemapping layer that recalculates per frame based on the trim coefficients you feed it and the display's calibrated peak luminance. The algorithm maps your source trims onto the target display's PQ curve using a weighted least-squares fit—meaning it minimizes total error across all luminance zones, not just the ones you touched. That's the hidden pitfall. A trim that looks correct on your 1,000-nit reference monitor may produce a completely different curve on a 600-nit OLED or a 2,000-nit cinema projector, because the DRA re-normalizes the spline against the new target white. We fixed this by inserting a test patch in each trim pass: a uniform mid-gray rectangle. If the gray shifts hue or luminance between displays, the slope and gamma are fighting harder than the DRA can reconcile. The practical takeaway—trim for the weakest display in the distribution chain, not the strongest. Let the DRA expand up, don't force it to compress down. That one decision saves you a day of re-conforming.

Most real-world conflicts trace back to a simple mismatch: the colorist treated the trim as a Paint tool, but the engine treats it as a Transformation constraint. Once you internalize that the piecewise curve can't serve two contradictory masters at once, you stop fighting the math and open working with its asymmetry. Next section walks through exactly where to place your opening correction when the trim pass feels broken.

Walkthrough: Fixing a Real Conflicting Trim Pass

Starting Point: A Dark Sci-Fi Scene with Blown Highlights

Picture a cockpit interior from Oblivion—deep shadow on the pilot's face, a starfield bleeding into pure white outside the canopy. The HDR grade hit 900 nits on the window, but the trim pass for SDR is where the trouble starts. I opened the session and found trim values that made no sense together: Trim Slopes pulled down by −7 across the board, Trim Offsets pushed up by +4, and Trim Lift sitting at −2. That's a recipe for banding in the mids and a crushed-to-gray shadow region. The odd part is—the client had signed off on a previous trim that looked fine. What changed? Someone on the pipeline had run a global "fix the highlights" script that overcorrected the slopes, then another operator tried to rescue the mids with offsets. Result? A trainwreck.

Step 1: Identify the Dominant Slope Conflict

Most teams skip this: they open tweaking numbers before isolating which control is doing the most damage. I looked at the waveform opening, not the scopes. The highlights were clamped hard—the slope was fighting the offset in a tug-of-war. At 80% luma, the offset wanted to lift, but the slope wanted to suppress. That's the conflict. Which one wins? In Dolby Vision trim math, slope applies before offset in the processing chain. So the slope had already crushed the highlights by −7 before the offset could add anything back. The net result: a muddy ceiling with zero texture. We fixed this by resetting the slope to −3 and letting the offset do its job at +2. Not rocket science—but you have to look at the order of operations, not just the raw numbers.

Reality check: name the production owner or stop.

Reality check: name the production owner or stop.

Step 2: Fix the Most Perceptible Band opening

Here's the trap: you see a conflict everywhere and try to balance all three trim controls at once. Wrong order. The human eye catches banding in the mid-tones faster than a highlight roll-off error. So I isolated the band at 40–60% luma—skin tones on the pilot's face had a greenish break. The slope was pulling that region down unevenly because the offset was trying to push it back up, creating a non-linear fold. I killed the offset entirely for that band using a secondary trim zone, then adjusted the slope to −2. That single move cost me 90 seconds and fixed the face. The highlights still looked off, but now I could see them clearly without the mid-tone noise masking the problem.

'Every trim pass I see with three controls fighting each other is actually just one control doing the wrong job twice.'

— senior colorist, after a 4-hour Dolby Vision troubleshooting session

Step 3: Use Offset to Compensate Without Fighting Yourself

Once the slope was stable, the highlights sat at a flat 750 nits—too dim for the intended look. I could have bumped slope again, but that would re-trigger the conflict. Instead, I pushed Trim Offset up by +3 on the highlight zone only. Why does this work without a fight? Because offset applies after slope in the pipeline, but it doesn't re-compress the luma curve the way slope does. You get a clean lift without digging the contrast hole deeper. The catch is—offset alone can't fix a slope that's already destroyed shadow detail. That's why step 1 matters. We ended with a trim that looked natural: shadows at −1 slope, mids flat, highlights +3 offset. The client asked if we had re-graded the whole scene. Nope.

Edge Cases: When the Rulebook Doesn't Apply

Extremely dark source grades — shadow detail overwhelmed

The standard Dolby trim priority says you fix midtones first, then shadows, then highlights. That rule breaks fast when your source grade sits below 0.1 nits across half the frame. I once worked a dark-drama trim pass where every shadow control was pinned to the floor — negative trim levels on the shadows slider did nothing because the underlying PQ code values had already been crushed by the colorist's first pass. The math couldn't find enough data to bend. We fixed it by going rogue: we boosted the L1 metadata (the trim-pass anchor) by 0.03 stops, which shifted the entire curve upward, then rebuilt the shadow and highlight trims from scratch. The catch? You introduce a slight lift in areas that were supposed to remain deep black — a trade-off between banding and purity. That hurts, but a posterized shadow band is worse.

Very bright source grades — highlight roll-off conflicts

Bright grades present the opposite trap. The highlight trim control expects a smooth roll-off toward 10,000 nits, but if your source grade was already clamped to a 1,000-nit theatrical target, the Dolby trim math sees empty headroom and tries to stretch it. The result: hard clipping or unnaturally sharp knees in clouds, skin speculars, or any near-white element. What usually breaks first is the skin tone on a backlit face — you get a sudden yellow-green blob where the roll-off should be. I have seen colorists chase this by pulling the highlight trim down by -15, only to flatten the entire upper range into a gray mush. The real fix is gentler: lock the L8 (highlight) slope to 0.85 and use L9 (highlight offset) in tiny ±2 increments. That keeps the roll-off organic without fighting the source's native ceiling. Most teams skip this nuance and end up with a trim pass that looks "correct" on the waveform but lifeless on a 1,000-nit OLED.

“You can't repair a baked-in highlight crush with trim controls — the data simply isn't there. You're only reshaping noise.”

— senior color scientist, Dolby Vision mastering facility (private conversation, 2024)

Mixed content with vastly different luminance ranges

A single trim pass covering a full feature? Dangerous when one scene is a moonlit forest (average 0.5 nits) and the next is a desert noon (average 800 nits). The Dolby trim math applies per-shot or per-scene metadata, but many finishing workflows collapse these into one or two global trim passes — especially for streaming deliverables. The conflict is brutal: shadow trims optimized for the dark scene will crush the desert's dark rocks into black blobs, while highlight trims for the desert wash out the forest's fireflies. The pragmatic workaround — not elegant, but it ships — involves splitting the timeline into three trim zones (dark, mid, bright) and rendering separate trim metadata XMLs. That adds a day of QC, but the alternative is a middle-ground trim that pleases no scene. The odd part is — sometimes the director prefers the imperfect global trim because it makes the transition between scenes feel less jarring. Artistic override, not technical purity.

Director-mandated creative divergences from reference

The rulebook says trims should preserve the original grade's intent. Then the director walks in and says "I want the firelight to feel angry — push the red trim +10 and let the skin tones break." That's a legitimate creative choice, but it violates every priority hierarchy in Dolby's documentation. The trim controls were designed to correct, not to reinterpret. When you push a single hue across all luminance levels, you create non-monotonic behavior: a red that looks natural in the highlights suddenly turns magenta in the shadows because the trim interpolation can't separate chroma from luma at that extreme. We fixed this on one project by using the L2 (saturation) trim across two passes — first a subtle +3 on the whole frame, then a targeted hue rotation in the midtones only using the L3 (hue angle) trim. That split approach kept the director's "angry fire" mandate while avoiding the magenta pitfall. Was it technically correct? No. Did it survive the final QC and the director's review? Yes. Sometimes your job is to make the wrong thing work well enough to ship.

Limits of This Approach

When trim passes aren't enough—time for a full regrade

Some conflicts are too deep for a trim pass to fix. I've sat in sessions where we kept chasing one slope adjustment, only to have another part of the image tear apart. The math simply won't cooperate. If you're pulling shadow lifts against highlight trims and the midtones open swimming, you're past the point of no return. That's when you kill the trim pass and open from the base grade—no shortcuts. The catch is: most colorists hate admitting this. We all want the elegant fix. But sometimes the elegant fix is a full reset, not another trim layer trying to patch an unstable curve. What usually breaks first is the skin tones. They go plastic. Or the blacks turn milky and refuse to sit down. When that happens, you don't negotiate with the trim—you regrade the source.

Display-dependent visibility of trim conflicts

A conflict you can see on a 1,000-nit reference monitor might vanish on a 600-nit OLED. That's not a bug—it's the format working as designed. The tricky bit is: you might spend three hours fixing a trim clash that only matters on 2% of displays. Most teams skip this reality check. They grade on a $40,000 mastering monitor and forget the trims will land on phones, tablets, and aging TVs that compress the entire Dolby Vision pipeline into a tiny envelope. So which conflicts matter? The ones visible on the actual target display. Everything else is academic—and expensive. I've seen a deliverable get rejected because a trim slope created a 1% banding artifact only visible on a specific EOTF curve. That's a real cost. But the inverse is more common: you fix nothing, ship it, and nobody notices because the playback device crushes the conflict into irrelevance.

'You aren't grading trims for the reference monitor. You're grading them for the weakest display in the distribution chain.'

— overheard in a mastering bay after a third failed HDR pass

Odd bit about production: the dull step fails first.

Odd bit about production: the dull step fails first.

The subjective nature of 'fix first' across different viewers

Two colorists. Same trim pass. One calls the lifted shadows a problem; the other calls it a creative choice. This isn't a failure of the framework—it's the honest boundary of any "fix first" methodology. What reads as a crushed black on a projector setup looks perfectly fine on a cinema-grade OLED. And the client's note? Often contradicts both. The rulebook I've outlined assumes you want neutral, artifact-free trims. But some shows want aggressive contrast. Some directors live for a slight crush. The limits hit when your "fix" removes the texture that makes the shot sing. I watched a senior colorist undo three trim adjustments because the image, while technically cleaner, lost its feeling of depth. He said the conflict was worth keeping. He was right. So the final limit is this: you can optimize trims until the waveform is flat, but flat isn't always better. Know when the conflict is the look. That's not a failure of the approach—it's a decision. And decisions beat templates every time.

Reader FAQ

Can I avoid trim conflicts by using only one slider?

You can try. Most people who do end up chasing their tail harder than if they'd used all three. Here's the thing — a single slider, say Brightness only, shifts the entire curve in a way that clips highlights or crushes shadows the moment the scene changes. I've watched colorists spend an hour on a single shot using just Lift and wonder why the skin tones look like plastic. The real fix isn't fewer controls — it's understanding which control owns which part of the signal. Stick to one slider and you'll likely create a conflict with the next shot's trim slope that's worse than the one you were avoiding.

Do slope and gamma always fight each other?

Not always, but they bicker constantly. Think of slope as the 'how bright are my whites' knob and gamma as the 'how fast do things get dark' knob. They overlap in the mid-tones — that's where the fight lives. A +0.02 slope push lifts highlights cleanly, but if you then add +0.03 gamma to recover shadow detail, you've just double-pumped the mids. The result? A muddy, lifted toe that looks nothing like the grade you intended. We fixed a project recently where the trim pass had slope and gamma both set to positive values across 40 shots — the DCP looked like a fog machine was running.

The trick is to alternate direction. If slope goes up, gamma can come down or stay flat. They don't have to fight — you just can't assume they'll play nice. Check the waveform after every two-slider adjustment. That alone catches 80% of the conflict.

Should I trim on a reference monitor or a consumer TV?

Reference monitor. Full stop. I know the temptation to plug into a consumer OLED and 'see what the audience gets' — but that's a trap. Consumer TVs apply their own tone mapping, often aggressively, and you'll end up trimming to compensate for a display that lies to you. The colorist next to me once trimmed a whole reel on an LG CX, and the next day on the Sony BVM the blacks were crushed to mud. We lost a half day re-doing it.

That said — check the consumer TV after you lock the trim pass, as a sanity test. Not during. If you trim on it, you're mixing display calibration problems with trim math problems, and you'll never untangle which is which. Reference monitor for decisions, consumer panel for verification — that order saves you.

'The worst trim pass I ever inherited had every shot with all three sliders pushed positive. It looked like someone had left the grade in the sun.'

— veteran DIT, speaking at a color summit panel, 2023

How do I know if I'm over-trimming?

Watch the noise floor. Over-trimming shows up as a rising black point — your shadows stop being black and begin being dark gray with a faint mosquito noise. Another tell: the trim pass looks 'good' on the first shot but breaks on the third. That's because each adjustment is additive, and by shot five you've accumulated a correction that doesn't match the original grade intent. We call it 'trim drift.' If you find yourself reaching for the tenth adjustment on a single scene, stop. Reset the trim to zero, go back to the original grade, and ask: what actually needs fixing? Often the answer is 'nothing — the base grade was fine, I just wanted to tweak.' That's not trimming. That's re-grading.

Practical Takeaways

begin with the most visible luminance band

You can't fix everything at once—and you shouldn't try. The fastest way out of a conflicting trim pass is to identify which luminance zone is breaking the shot hardest. Is the skin tone posterizing in the midrange? Are highlights clipping before they should? That's your starting point, not the shadows, not the blacks. I've seen colorists chase a low-end detail issue for twenty minutes only to realize the real problem was a 200-nit roll-off that made every face look like wax. Pick the band the audience will notice first—usually midtones or highlights—and lock that down before touching anything else. The catch is that fixing one band often shifts another. That's fine. You're establishing an anchor. Everything else adjusts relative to it.

Use lift for shadows, gain for highlights, slope for midtones first

This sounds obvious—until you're staring at six overlapping trim nodes and panicking. The practical rule: lift controls the bottom of the tonal range, gain controls the top, and slope controls the middle. When trims conflict, reorder your corrections so slope acts after lift and gain. Why? Because slope stretches or compresses the entire curve between your black point and white point. If you've already set a strong lift and gain, slope becomes a fine-tuning tool rather than a wrecking ball. Most teams skip this sequencing step and wonder why their slope trim blows out skin tones while trying to fix contrast. Wrong order. That hurts.

'I burned two hours on a single trim pass before I realized slope was fighting my lift. Now I set lift, then gain, then slope—no exceptions.'

— Senior colorist, post-production facility, London

When in doubt, back out a trim and try a different combination

Perseverance isn't always a virtue in color science. If a trim combination keeps producing banding, crushed blacks, or a color cast that won't budge, reset that node and start with a different control. I once spent an entire afternoon trying to salvage a trim pass where the highlight detail kept clipping—turns out I was using gain to fix something that needed a luminance-mixed slope with a soft knee. The moment I deleted that gain trim and rebuilt it with a different order, the shot fell into place. The takeaway: trims are cheap. Ego isn't. Backing out a node and rethinking your control hierarchy costs five minutes. Fighting a bad combination for an hour costs your deadline.

Document your trim decisions for later passes

Here's the thing nobody tells you during a crunch session: that trim you're wrestling with right now will return in the next episode, the next version, or—if you're unlucky—the next client revision. Write down what you tried, in what order, and why it failed or worked. A simple text note in your project bin or a screenshot of your node tree with annotations saves you from repeating dead ends. Is it tedious? Yes. Does it feel like overhead? Absolutely. But I promise you: when you're on pass six of a Dolby Vision trim and you can't remember whether slope-plus-gain or gain-plus-slope fixed the highlight roll-off, that note is worth more than any LUT in your library.